New Moon Again

I've read the first 299 pages of the Twilight sequel, New Moon, and I actually think, Stephenie Meyer captures the emotions of the story really well.

I was playing my Mariah Carey songs playlist as I read the first half of the book, beginning with Through The Rain, the first track of Charmbracelet. After the Charmbracelet album completed playing, the next album was The Emancipation of Mimi, and it was super co-incidental that while Mine Again was playing, I was reading the scene when Bella was talking to Jacob for the first time since he got "mono", since they hung out with Mike Newton at the movies.

I was most impressed by that scene because you can really see the contrasting difference between Bella and Jacob's friendship before and after what would be revealed as Jacob's beginnings as a werewolf.

Bella and Jacob were actually really good friends, continuously making jokes of each other's age, sharing an interest in re-building motorbikes and practically hanging out together with so much to talk about and so much to laugh.

And then, when Jacob suddenly disppears (his father coming up with a bad excuse that he's got mononucleiosis), he and Bella meet again again in a very long time, but the friendship has changed drastically. Jacob's eyes are really fierce, and his tone towards Bella makes him sound like a stranger. And Bella's just helpless because she has no idea what's going on with Jacob, who idiotically refuses to tell her.

I just see a parallel of these two contrasting friendships with the actual world, because one moment we are best friends with a particular individual, and then many months or probably the year later, we don't talk anymore, and sometimes, the only thing we ask ourselves is, "how did we get here".

Anyway, I've not yet explained what Mariah's Mine Again song has to do with that Jacob-Bella scene.

"Maybe you could be mine again. Maybe we could make that dream for real, like way back then."

The song's simply about the protagonist wishing everything could revert back.

The Twilight Saga is not cleverer than Harry Potter, but it does successfully capture intended emotions and amplifies them all over its pages. However, this is most probably because Twilight is written in first-person while Harry Potter is a third-person perspective.

Okay, why do I keep comparing Twilight to Harry Potter? I've already established that they are different. I do enjoy tremendously the fact that the Twilight movies stay very very very close to the books. The dialogue in the films are taken straight out of the books (although with minor edits, which is perfectly understandable), and the scene progression is similar.

In comparison with Harry Potter (sorry that I'm doing it once again), Twilight seems more faithful. The major Harry Potter plot is retained in the HP movies, but because the Potter universe is so massive, several sub-plots were condensed or removed in the films, and the dialogue in the Potter films are also pretty different from those in the books. It's alright, but I do prefer if the books and the movies were very closely related.

P.S. My reading rate is approximately 100 New Moon-sized pages in 1 hour, which means it will take me probably 2 and a half hours to complete the book and move on to Eclipse, which I am most excited to read since the movie's releasing in a matter of months.